Newsmakers | Spring 2023

Sky Hopinka RI ’19 has won Art Basel’s prestigious $33,000 Baloise Art Prize for his four-channel film Just a Soul Responding. “In addition to the cash prize, Baloise acquires a group of works by the award winners and donates them to two important European museums,” said Baloise in the award statement. “The works of Sky Hopinka were presented to the collection of the MMK, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt.”

Jing Tsu PhD ’01, RI ’09 was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for her book Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern (Riverhead Books, 2022).

The Hollywood Reporter announced the 11 winners of the 2023 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, which included the tap artist and choreographer Ayodele Casel RI ’20, the composer Erin Gee RI ’10, and the filmmaker Christopher Harris RI ’21. The award “provides unrestricted support to mid-career artists pushing the boundaries of their craft,” says the Herb Alpert Foundation on its website.

Among the 269 newly elected members of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences are Leda Cosmides ’79, AM 84, PhD ’85; Neta Crawford BI ’99; Catherine Z. Elgin BI ’95; Rosemarie Garland-Thomson RI ’12; Major Jackson RI ’07; Michèle Lamont RI ’07; L. Mahadevan RI ’15; Emily Mann ’74; Tiya Miles ’92, RI ’22; Priyamvada Natarajan RI ’09; Laurence Ralph RI ’16; Amy Sillman RI ’11; Zadie Smith RI ’03; Carol S. Steiker ’82, JD ’86, RI ’15; Susan S. Wallach ’68, JD ’71; Daniel Ziblatt RI ’16; and Steven J. Zipperstein RI ’09.

Both winners of the Cleveland Foundation’s 2023 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for fiction are part of the Radcliffe family: Geraldine Brooks RI ‘06 for Horse (Viking, 2022) and Lan Samantha Chang MPA ’91, RI ’01 for The Family Chao (W. W. Norton, 2022). In addition, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, the 1995 Radcliffe Medalist, received the award for lifetime achievement. The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award is the only juried prize for literature that tackles themes of racism and diversity.

Leah Wright Rigueur RI ’18 won a 2023 Ambie for Best Podcast Host for Reclaimed: The Story of Mamie Till-Mobley. The Ambies—the Awards for Excellence in Audio—are administered by the Podcast Academy and recognize excellence in the field, both in front and behind the microphone.

Among the finalists of the 2023 PEN America Literary Awards were Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin RI ’17 for the 2023 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, for Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality (Pantheon, 2022); Roger Reeves RI ’22 for the 2023 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection, for Best Barbarian (W. W. Norton, 2022); and Javier Zamora RI ’19 and his memoir Solito (Hogarth Press, 2022) for the 2023 PEN Open Book Award. In addition, Sarah Manguso ’96 was on the longlist for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, for her novel Very Cold People (Hogarth Press, 2022). A number of Radcliffe affiliates helped judge this year’s awards: Lauren Groff RI ’19, Joan Naviyuk Kane ’00, RI ’20, Jill Lepore BI ’00, RI ’20, and Nina McConigley RI ’20.

The audiobooks for Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts (Podium Audio, 2022), by Rebecca Hall RI ’23 and Hugo Martinez, and The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (Penguin Random House Audio, 2021), to which a number of Radcliffe affiliates contributed, were finalists for the Audiobook of the Year award at the 2023 Audie Awards. The latter also garnered a nomination in the multi-voiced performance category for Reginald Dwayne Betts RI ’12, Ibram X. Kendi RI ’21, Khalil Gibran Muhammad RI ’17, RI ’20, ZZ Packer RI ’15, Evie Shockley RI ’19, Tracy K. Smith ’94, and Natasha Trethewey RI ’01. Mad Honey (Penguin Random House Audio, 2022), by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan RI ’23, is a finalist in the fiction category, and Horse (Penguin Random House Audio, 2022), by Geraldine Brooks RI ’06, in the literary fiction and classics category.

The film Eami (2022), by Paz Encina RI ’23, won the Premio Coral de Largometraje Documental (Coral Prize for Documentary Feature) at the Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano, also known as the Habana Film Festival.

Three of the Before Columbus Foundation’s 2022 American Book Awards went to Radcliffe fellows: Daphne A. Brooks RI ’11 won for Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard University Press, 2021); Francisco Goldman RI ’19 for Monkey Boy (Grove Press, 2021); and Phillip B. Williams RI ’21 for Mutiny (Penguin Books, 2021).

Bomb Magazine published an interview with Mary Lum RI ’05 about her exhibition The Moving Parts &, which is on view at Radcliffe through June 24. In it, Lum discusses the Corita papers at the Schlesinger, includes a number of photographs of the exhibition, and mentions the novella A Rock, A River, A Street (Primary Information, 2022), by Steffani Jemison RI ’18. (See Shelf Life.)

The writer W. Ralph Eubanks RI ’22 sees a region of his home state anew after decades in the northeast in “Mississippi Delta: Returning Home to Its Haunted Past,” published in Outside.

In the Washington Post opinion piece “Where Have All the Assault Rifles Gone?” Jennifer Finney Boylan RI ’23 showcases the work of Ieva Jusionyte RI ’23, who studies the flow of guns from the United States into Mexico. In an earlier in the Washington Post opinion piece “To Understand Biological Sex, Look at the Brain, Not the Body,“ Boylan asks what it means to feel like a woman, and she also published the New York Times guest essay “Jimmy Carter Made Me a Better American” shortly after the former president entered hospice.

Francesca Mari ’07, RI ’23 writes about Vienna’s social housing system, which could serve as a model for solving the worldwide housing crisis, in “Imagine a Renters’ Utopia. It Might Look Like Vienna.” The article appeared in the New York Times Magazine.

If one truly wants to understand the essence of Los Angeles through a few books, the writer Héctor Tobar RI ’21 has a few suggestions. He lists them in “Read Your Way through Los Angeles,” which appered in the New York Times. Tobar’s most recent book is Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino” (MCD, 2023). (See Shelf Life.)

The Los Angeles Times published “Can an Amazon Envelope Help Us Map Out What a Decolonized Future Could Look Like?” by Clarissa Tossin RI ’18. The story continues the project she initiated at Radcliffe, which considers issues related to the Amazon rainforest through Amazon packaging materials.

In “From ‘Front-Page Girls’ to Newsroom Leaders,” which appeared in the New York Times, Jane Kamensky BI ’97, RI ’07—the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Director of our Schlesinger Library and the Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences—reviews Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism (Knopf, 2023), by Brooke Kroeger, a new, “deeply researched and encyclopedic” history of women in the newsroom. Earlier—on the heels of the 2023 meeting of the American Historical Association, which saw a lot of disagreements about how history is written—Kamensky defended “slow” history research (and called for its funding) in the New York Times article “As Historians Gather, No Truce in the History Wars.”

Quanta Magazine published an overview of two experiments that prove the existence of the previously elusive non-abelian anyons. Eun-Ah Kim RI ’23, who herself spent years looking for these particles, and her work appear in the article, “Physicists Create Elusive Particles That Remember Their Pasts.”

The New York Times article “She Redefined Trauma. Then Trauma Redefined Her.” chronicles the return of Judith Herman ’64, MD ’68, BI ’85, RI ’02 after her career was derailed by an injury and chronic pain. In March, Herman published Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice (Basic Books, 2023); the book is a follow-up to her trailblazing Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (Basic Books, 1992), which helped launch the field of trauma studies. (See Shelf Life.)

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, has selected Gala Porras-Kim RI ’20 as a finalist for the Korea Artist Prize 2023 exhibition, reported ArtDependence Magazine. Art in America looks at the rise of research-based artwork in “Research Art Is Everywhere. But Some Artists Do It Better than Others,” using her work as an example. Porras-Kim’s 2022 exhibition Precipitation for an Arid Landscape displayed items from Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology that centered on Maya objects. “In combining artistic research and institutional critique, artists like Porras-Kim and the others surveyed here are critically interrogating the institutions thought to be arbiters of authority,” says the article. “Rather than conducting investigations in order to present conclusive results, they unsettle and expand how we can see the world with all its inglorious pasts.” Porras-Kim is currently participating in Liverpool Biennial 2023. (See Art Aware.)

The New York Review of Books published a deep dive into the works of Tsitsi Dangarembga RI ’23, “Zimbabwe’s Wounds of Empire.” Dangarembga published a collection of essays, Black and Female (Graywolf Press, 2023), earlier this year. (See Shelf Life.) The Economist’s 1843 Magazine profiled the novelist and filmmaker in “Are Great Writers Forged by Repressive Regimes or Crushed by Them?” And Financial Times included Dangarembga among the creators in its roundup “The FT’s Most Influential Women of 2022,” in which they called her an “inspirational scribe.”

In a recent publication in Science Advances, Chiara Zurzolo RI ’19 at Institut Pasteur and her Harvard collaborators offer the first look at nanoscopic tunnels that connect cells in the cerebellum—an area of the brain involved in maintaining balance and posture—as they mature into neurons immediately after birth.

“The Black Artists Claiming More Space than Ever Before,” in the New York Times Style Magazine, looked at recent large-scale works by Black artists—including Brava! (2022), by EJ Hill RI ’19, currently on view at Mass MoCA, and Align (2022), by Xaviera Simmons, who created the exhibition Overlay from research done at the Schlesinger Library.

In “Black, Evangelical and Torn,” which appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Caleb Gayle MBA ’19, MPP ’19, RI ’23 profiles Black pastors—all members of the Southern Baptist Convention—who are reckoning with tension between their own identity and their denomination’s approach to racial issues.

Imani Perry JD ’00, PhD ’00, a recently appointed Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at Radcliffe, wrote about her experience with a painful autoimmune disease in “A Dangerously High Threshold for Pain,” which appeared in the New York Times.

In 2020, a Hindu mob in northeast Delhi turned against its Muslim neighbors. One man spent nearly three years waiting to enter legal testimony about the violence. Rahul Bhatia RI ’23 followed the story for the Guardian’s Long Read, “The Trials of an Indian Witness: How a Muslim Man Was Caught in a Legal Nightmare.”

Annette Gordon-Reed JD ’84, RI ’12, RI ’13, RI ’14, RI ’16 was the first Black child to attend a white public school in her hometown of Conroe, Texas. In “A Historian Makes History in Texas,” in the Wall Street Journal, she reflects on what it’s like to now have an elementary named after her in the Conroe school district.

The Financial Times recently featured Jing Tsu PhD ’01, RI ’09 in its Lunch with the FT series. In “Jing Tsu: ‘The Days of Armchair Scholarship Are Over if You’re Studying China,’” the Yale University professor of Chinese literature, history, and culture discusses the role of cultural understanding between China and the West.

The New York Times profiled Kizzmekia S. Corbett—a Shutzer Assistant Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, an assistant professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and an associate member of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard—in its Transforming Spaces series, about women driving change. “She Helped Unlock the Science of the Covid Vaccine” tells the story of how the viral immunologist helped develop the COVID-19 vaccine during her time at National Institutes of Health.

In the Scientific American article “How Scientists Are Using AI to Talk to Animals,” Karen Bakker RI ’23 goes over recent digital breakthrough that could help us talk to nonhuman animals. Recent recordings have shown that arrau turtles communicate with their eggs, reported the Washington Post in “The Turtle Moms that ‘Talk’ to Their Eggs before They Hatch.” By way of explanation for why this phenomenon wasn’t discovered earlier, Bakker, who wrote about turtle communication in her book The Sounds of Life, says, “Had we had a bit more expansive imaginations, we might have caught this earlier.”

In honor of Black History Month, the New York Post published its list “16 Popular Books about Black History, According to Goodreads,” which included titles by members of the Radcliffe community, including The Trayvon Generation (Grand Central Publishing, 2022), by Elizabeth Alexander RI ’08; Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality (Pantheon, 2022), by Tomiko Brown-Nagin RI ’17; Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts (Simon & Schuster, 2022), by Rebecca Hall RI ’23 and illustrated by Hugo Martinez; Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619–2019 (One World, 2021), by Ibram X. Kendi RI ’21 and Keisha N. Blain; All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (Random House, 2021), by Tiya Miles ’92, RI ’22; and South to America: A Journey below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation (Ecco, 2022), by the incoming Radcliffe professor Imani Perry JD ’00, PhD ’00.

Coming this month, What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds (Penguin Press, 2023), by Jennifer Ackerman BI ’98, offers a deep dive on the biology and natural history of the elusive bird. See the Radcliffe Magazine review.

Bonnie Gordon RI ’02 has published her multidisciplinary book Voice Machines: The Castrato, the Cat Piano, and Other Strange Sounds (University of Chicago Press, 2023), in which she interweaves the history of the castrato with other early modern technologies to ask provocative questions about sound.

Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino” (MCD, 2023) is the latest from Héctor Tobar RI ’21. The book, on which he worked during his Radcliffe fellowship year, is his sixth. “Tobar is unpreoccupied with settling on a fixed definition of ‘Latino,’” said “Who or What Is ‘Latino’? Héctor Tobar Considers a Term’s Many Meanings.” in the New York Times. “Instead, like a sculptor chipping away at a mass of stone, he is interested in revealing a human shape within it.”

Daughter of History: Traces of an Immigrant Girlhood (Stanford University Press, 2023), the latest memoir by Susan Rubin Suleiman AM ’64, PhD ’69, RI ’06, takes small everyday objects as a springboard to narrate Suleiman’s early life as a Holocaust survivor and immigrant to the United States, along the way examining the impact of historical events on personal lives.

Victoria Sanford BI ’00 has published Textures of Terror: The Murder of Claudina Isabel Velasquez and Her Father’s Quest for Justice (University of California Press, 2023), which is part memoir and part forensic investigation. The author of seven books, Sanford is a writer, public scholar, human rights advocate and professor of anthropology at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Chad L. Williams RI ’18 has published the book on which he worked during his Radcliffe fellowship. The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023) was sparked by Du Bois’s unfinished 800-page manuscript about the Black experience in World War I. In the review “The World War I Editorial that W.E.B. Du Bois Regretted for Years,” the Washington Post calls the book “Prodigiously researched and compulsively readable,” declaring that Williams’s approach allows “Du Bois’s biography to unfold in all its messy, captivating, inspiring complexity.” See the Radcliffe Magazine review.

Brown Boy (Scribner, 2023), the memoir by Omer Aziz RI ’23, was elected by Apple Books as one of the most anticipated books of spring 2023. See a Q and A with Aziz in this issue.

Judith Herman ’64, MD ’68, BI ’85, RI ’02 has published Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice (Basic Books, 2023), a follow-up to her trailblazing book that helped launch the field of trauma studies. “Truth and Repair stands entirely on its own, but when read alongside Trauma and Recovery, it is striking to see how consistent Herman’s tone of measured, calm inquiry has been through the decades, how firm her resolve, how clear her language,” said a New York Times Review of Herman’s book. “Each book has immense value. Together, they are blazing bookends for an incredible career.”

Old Babes in the Wood (Doubleday, 2023) is the ninth short story collection from Margaret Atwood AM ’62. “If you consider yourself an Atwood fan and have only read her novels: Get your act together,” said a New York Times review. “You’ve been missing out.”

Charmaine Craig ’94 has published a third novel, My Nemesis (Grove Press, 2023). Kirkus Reviews declared it “cerebral and tense,” saying, “Craig has crafted an intense portrayal of an intellectual affair as well as a private competition between two women with perfectly balanced moments of tension and introspection.”

Jarvis R. Givens RI ’21 collects more than a hundred firsthand accounts from Black students in the 19th and 20th centuries in School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness (Beacon Press, 2023). Kirkus Reviews deemed it a “sharp examination of how Black students have consistently overcome institutionalized racism” that “will appeal especially to educators and historians, triumphantly rewrites Black students into a history that has ignored them. An eloquently necessary study.”

Tsitsi Dangarembga RI ’23 published a collection of essays, Black and Female (Graywolf Press, 2023). “In this short, serious and powerful nonfiction piece, she undertakes a deep dive into the consequences of racism and misogyny on her development as an author, a thinker and a woman in the world,” said the Guardian in a review.

In A Woman's Life Is a Human Life: My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice (Grove Press, 2023), Felicia Kornbluh ’88 offers a history of ordinary people working for reproductive rights in New York before Roe v. Wade—specifically, those who worked to decriminalize abortion and those who fought to end the abuse of sterilization in minority communities. Publishers Weekly called it “eye opening,” and Kirkus Reviews said, “Both timely and engaging, this insightful study reveals that the battle for abortion rights must be considered only one part of a much larger, more complex struggle that needs to address the protection of the sexual freedom and choices of all women.”

V. V. Ganeshananthan ’02, RI ’15 has published her second novel, Brotherless Night (Random House, 2023), on which she worked during her Radcliffe fellowship. A New York Times book review, “‘Terrorist’—to Whom?” says, “Perhaps Ganeshananthan’s finest achievement in Brotherless Night is showing, with meticulous accuracy, what it feels like to inhabit a day-to-day life onto which someone else, from the privilege of great distance, can throw a word like ‘terrorism,’ and be done.” See the Radcliffe Magazine review.

The artist Steffani Jemison RI ’18 has published a novella titled A Rock, A River, A Street (Primary Information, 2022). “The text is expansive and spacious,” said the Brooklyn Rail in a review. 

Coming in August, Memory, Edited (MIT Press, 2023), by Abby Smith Rumsey ’74, PhD ’87, examines collective memory through an interdisciplinary lens to show how narratives are constructed.

Gala Porras-Kim RI ’20 is currently participating in Liverpool Biennial 2023. Her piece Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing (2022), which questions museum storage systems through mold spores harvested at the British Museum and is related to work she began at Radcliffe, is on view through September 17. (For more about Porras-Kim’s research-based art, see Inklings.)

A watercolor by Catherine Bertulli BI ’83, Garden Party (1978), is included in the recently opened Harvard Art Museums exhibition American Watercolors, 1880–1980: Into the Light, which is on view through August 13, 2023. An exhibition catalog is available.

A large-scale artwork by Steffani Jemison RI ’18, Sky Is the Only Roof (2023), is on view through July 15 through Counterpublic, a triennial exhibition in St. Louis to “reimagine civic infrastructure towards intergenerational change,” said the organization.

The world premiere of the A.K. Burns RI ’17 exhibition Of space we are… is on view through July 9 at Wexner Center for the Arts. It includes the three-channel video titled What Is Perverse Is Liquid (NS 0000) (2023), part of a cycle of video installations that were initially developed at Radcliffe. The current iteration is reviewed in Artforum, and their first monograph A.K. Burns: Negative Space (Dancing Foxes Press/Wexner Center for the Arts, 2023) is forthcoming.

Stick People, a group show at the artist-run storefront art projects, includes a multimedia piece by Beth Galston BI ’91. The exhibition, which brings together the tree-based work of nine artists, is on view during limited hours at the Watertown-based gallery through June 24.

The Bronx Museum of the Arts is currently hosting work by Abigail DeVille RI ’15. Abigail DeVille: Bronx Heavens opened in the fall, and in March, its run was extended. The collection of sculptures and installations made of found materials and objects can now be seen through June 18. DeVille’s family has lived in the Bronx for four generations.

Alive Side, a solo exhibition of works by Every Ocean Hughes RI ’20, was on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art from January 14 to April 2. As part of the exhibition, the combined theater and concert performance Help the Dead (2019), which was Hughes's fellowship project, enjoyed four performances at the Whitney from January 27 to January 29. It was reviewed in Artforum. The international art magazine Apollo published an interview with the artist, “In the Studio with… Every Ocean Hughes.“

Anne Seelbach BI ’90 enjoyed a solo show, Elements Adrift, at Gallery North in Setauket, New York. The works, inspired by nature and the elements in particular, were on display from January 12 to February 19.

In late January, Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA) announced that Clarissa Tossin RI ’18 is among seven artists commissioned to create new short-form video works to be displayed at Los Angeles International Airport. Once completed, her work will appear at one of the large-scale digital screens located at the automated people mover (APM) electric train system. “These video artworks will create a stunning visual environment for the 30 million passengers per year expected to utilize the APM system,” said LAWA’a chief executive officer.

In late January, ARTNews reported that Kapwani Kiwanga RI ’23 is headed to the Venice Biennale next year. She will represent Canada. Read a Q and A with the artist about her work in progress. [LINK]

La Donna Musicale and Rumbarroco, both directed by Laury Gutiérrez RI ’09, teamed up to take part in the Boston Early Music Festival in early June. The program “Nigra sum sed formosa: Morenas in Ibero-America” presented pieces from the Iberian Renaissance to contemporary African-influenced South American folk traditions.

King Charles III commissioned Tarik O’Regan RI ’05 alongside two other composers, Paul Mealor and Judith Weir, to compose new music for his and the Queen Consort’s coronation, which took place at Westminster Abbey on May 6. The king shaped and selected the service’s musical program, which showcased musical talent from across the United Kingdom. “Given my own and my family’s diverse background from across many countries and heritages, I’m truly delighted to provide a musical voice from this perspective for the coronation service, an event of international interest,” said O’Regan in a statement. His piece is called "Coronation Agnus Dei," and it was performed by the Choir of Westminster Abbey.

BABA: The Life and Death of Stana, on which Karmina Šilec RI ’19 worked during her Radcliffe fellowship, had its world premiere at Z Space, in San Francisco, in February. The work was commissioned and performed by Kitka, a women’s vocal ensemble. The San Francisco Chronicle profiled Šilec in “Slovenian Composer Karmina Šilec Explores the Frontiers of Female Identity.”

De Humani Corporis Fabrica, the fourth experimental documentary collaboration by Véréna Paravel RI ’13 and Lucien Castaing-Taylor RI ’10 at Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Laboratory, appeared in American theaters last month. The film, which was filmed in several French hospitals and premiered last May at Cannes, is an up-close exploration of the human body in a medical context. The New Yorker profiled the filmmaking duo in “The Filmmakers Who Voyaged inside the Body.”

Abigail DeVille RI ’15, an artist who creates sculptures, installations, and performances, joined the cast of MTV’s latest docuseries, The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist. The show, which premiered in early March, follows seven artists as they compete for $100,000 and an exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. DeVille was one of the “art-world insiders” to help judge the competition.

Jing Tsu PhD ’01, RI ’09 appeared on CNN’s Amanpour to discuss the evolution of China and its language, the topic of her latest book, Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern (Riverhead Books, 2022), which was reissued in paperback earlier this year.

Kim’s Video, the latest documentary from the filmmaking duo of David Redmon RI ’11 and Ashley Sabin, screened at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival as part of the Next series. The film follows the fate of a video rental business run out of an East Village dry cleaner—a 50,000-title collection that Redmon credits for his own film education. “The film is quixotic in a nutty way that is more refreshing than it is nostalgic,” says a review in The Arts Fuse.

Robin Young, the host of Here & Now, sat down for tea with Judith Herman ’64, MD ’68, BI ’85, RI ’02 for a segment about the psychologist and her important work on trauma. For more about Herman’s recent book Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice (Basic Books, 2023), see Shelf Life.

Erica Chenoweth RI ’22, a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Radcliffe and the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School, and Zoe Marks, a lecturer in public policy at HKS, will serve as the new faculty deans of Pforzheimer House starting on July 1. The two will live in “Pfoho” with their daughter, Vera.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin RI ’17—dean of Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, and professor of history in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences—addressed the graduates of Furman University at its 2023 commencement. Brown-Nagin graduated from Furman in 1992. Earlier, she appeared on the local Boston news show Chronicle to talk the subject of her book Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality (Pantheon, 2022).

Geraldine Acuña-Sunshine ’92, MPP ’96 has been elected as vice chair of the Harvard University Board of Overseers executive committee. She is a social entrepreneur, lawyer, and finance executive who divides her time between Boston and the Philippines.

The Asterisk*, a podcast produced by the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, hosted Tiya Miles ’92, RI ’22 on the first episode of its third season. Miles is a 2022 nonfiction Anisfield-Wolf winner.

The cartoonist Ebony Flowers RI ’23 appeared on an episode of Radio Boston alongside Joel Christian Gill, the inaugural chair of the Boston University MFA program in visual narrative, to discuss storytelling, authenticity, and teaching through the medium of comics. At Radcliffe, Flowers is currently working on “Awake Overnight,” a multimodal collection of short stories to be read through sight and touch.

Christina Warinner AM ’08, PhD ’10, a Sally Starling Seaver Associate Professor at Radcliffe and associate professor of anthropology in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, appeared on NPR’s Science Friday to discuss what we know about lactose intolerance and how (our gut microbiome has a lot to do with it).

The podcast Letters and Politics hosted Chad L. Williams RI ’18 to talk about his new book The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), on which he worked during his Radcliffe fellowship year.

Robin Mitchell RI ’22 has accepted an endowed professorship at the University at Buffalo’s College of Arts and Sciences, where she will be an associate professor in the Department of History, also affiliated with Department of Africana and American Studies.

The Scientific American podcast Science, Quickly featured the work of Karen Bakker RI ’23—whose The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing Us Closer to the World of Animals and Plants (Princeton University Press, 2022) explores how digital bioacoustics is allowing humans to more closely listen to the natural world—in a recent episode. Earlier. Bakker shared five takeaways from her recent book in an audio feature for the Next Big Idea Club. She also appeared on the podcast Many Minds to talk about bioacoustics and ecoacoustics, deep listening and digital listening, and many more concepts from her book.

Gish Jen ’77, BI ’87, RI ’02 appeared on the podcast Write-minded: Weekly Inspiration for Writers to talk about building tension in fiction and what her life experiences bring to her writing.

The podcast London Futurists hosted Francesca Rossi RI ’15 in its episode “ChatGPT Raises Old and New Concerns about AI.” Rossi is affiliated with the T.J. Watson Research Lab, in New York, and serves as president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Afterward, Forbes published some highlights from the episode.

Thea Riofrancos RI ’21, an associate professor of political science at Providence College, appeared on NPR’s Weekend Edition to talk about her recent research on the environmental costs of transitioning to electric vehicles in the United States. That research was also picked up by a number of news outlets across the political spectrum, including the Boston Globe, the Guardian, New York magazine’s Curbed, Treehugger, and the Washington Examiner.

Starting on January 23, the poet Major Jackson RI ’07 took over host duties on the podcast The Slowdown, which offers a poem and moment of reflection each weekday. Ada Limón—who served as the most recent host before leaving for her post as the 24th poet laureate of the United States—announced the news on episode 796 of the podcast, when she read Jackson’s “It Must Be the Supermarket in Me.”

In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, KQED’s Forum explored the civil rights icon’s visions for economic justice in “How America Has Failed to Achieve MLK’s Vision for Economic Justice.” Michael Honey RI ’21, a professor of labor and ethnic studies and American history at the University of Washington, Tacoma, took part in the conversation.

Lisa I. Iezzoni SM ’78, MD ’84, RI ’23 appeared on a featured segment of NPR’s Science Friday titled “Medicine Is Failing Disabled Patients. Meet the Doctors Pushing for Change.” There, she discussed the findings of recently published research and suggested solutions for what the medical community can do to better serve the disabled community.

The Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, featured Mary Lum RI ’05 on its podcast In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing. On an episode titled “‘I Never Start with Nothing’: Mary Lum on Collage and Constructed Geographies,” the artist talks about her influences and the process for making her recent Radcliffe exhibition, The Moving Parts (&).

In late fall, Tina Tallon RI ’21 appeared on a Science Friday segment about AI image generators and what they could mean for artists. The show also hosted her and other guests for a Twitter Spaces conversation on the same topic.